In February 1999, Thomas Epach Jr., a top prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, took on the daunting task of overseeing evidence presented to a grand jury that was reinvestigating the high-profile murder case against death row inmate Anthony Porter. Nearly 15 years later, he’d remain uncertain whether the right man ended up behind bars. Soon after, Epach, the office’s expert on the Porter case, found himself in the rather astonishing position of reinvestigating the case against an inmate who, days earlier, had been facing imminent execution....

It’s time to plan the week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 6/14: Local “crusty blackened deathgrind” band Immortal Bird play LiveWire Lounge (3394 N. Milwaukee) tonight. Monica Kendrick writes that Immortal Bird have the “ability to move from surprisingly anthemic punk-inflected numbers like ‘The Sycophant’ into droney ten-minute morasses of despair like ‘And Send Fire.’” 8 PM For more stuff to do this week—and every day—check out our Agenda page....

I asked, and the answer is no: Shannon Cochran does not wear kothornoi in the extraordinary revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes running now at Goodman Theatre. She sure looks as if she does, though. Kothornoi are the platform sandals ancient Greek actors wore (Aeschylus’s idea, allegedly) to look taller and more imposing onstage. Cochran enjoys a clear height advantage over most if not all of her fellow cast members....

I had the lowest expectations for Captive State. Alien insects in the near future subjugating earthlings and prompting a rebellion of ragtag misfits forced to band together to save humankind isn’t much of a selling point in my book. But it’s set in Chicago, so I had to go. I went in hoping for a dumb disaster flick with some cool location shots. What I got was a sly, impassioned rant about gentrification and authoritarianism, thinly disguised as a grimy B-movie....

Carcosa is a mysterious fictional city first named by author Ambrose Bierce in 1886 and later alluded to in Robert W. Chambers’s influential and evocative King in Yellow stories. As the ancient and possibly cursed capital of an alien place that’s impossible to pinpoint on earthly maps, it’s been incorporated into the works of H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, and other writers of weird fiction—the name even appeared in season one of True Detective....

As tempting as it is to indulge my wee-lad love of all things dream pop and compare Star’s fresh take on shoegaze to early-90s wombadelic practitioners (I’m not making up the term “wombadelia,” though it never really caught on), the band prefer the more open-ended tag “noise pop.” That said, the catchy three-minute nuggets on the local trio’s second album, Violence Against Star, sound like they could’ve charted in the UK alongside Ride and Lush if they’d been released in, say, 1992....

Under the name Colleen, French composer and multi-instrumentalist Cécile Schott has spent the past two decades traversing musical styles: She explored hypnagogic looped samples on her 2003 debut, Everyone Alive Wants Answers, dulcet folktronica on 2005’s The Golden Morning Breaks, and chamber-music ambience on 2007’s Les Ondes Silencieuses. Schott’s work is consistent in its arresting simplicity, but her pieces aren’t so much minimal as they are featherlight. Schott’s latest album, The Tunnel and the Clearing (Thrill Jockey), builds on the vocal pop of 2015’s Captain of None and the sparse electronics of 2017’s A Flame My Love, a Frequency....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, December 7, 2016. Rahm, City Council ask Rauner to support Chicago’s sanctuary city status Mayor Rahm Emanuel, newly sworn in Illinois comptroller Susana Mendoza, and most of the Chicago City Council sponsored a resolution asking Republican governor Bruce Rauner to support Chicago’s sanctuary city status. The legislation asks Rauner to publicly show “support for cities that welcome our undocumented family members and neighbors and condemn any effort to strip the city of Chicago of federal funding....

In February, when Chance the Rapper won his first Grammy (Best Rap Performance for “No Problem”), the first thing he uttered when he accepted the award was “Yo, Andrew Barber.” The story behind that shout-out starts a decade ago: At a time when few outlets cared about Chicago’s rap exports (beyond maybe Kanye West), Barber launched a blog called Fake Shore Drive with the sole intent of covering the city’s hip-hop scene....

David Cross has a knack for getting involved with deeply beloved but underwatched projects. All three of the TV shows he’s starred in have been labeled “cult classics”: Arrested Development; Mr. Show With Bob and David, currently revived for Netflix as With Bob and David; and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (he also had a hand in the creation and writing of the latter two programs). But now, thanks to two decades of appearances on television, in movies, and in comedy clubs around the world, he’s turned into something of a household name....

Moments after word broke late Monday night that Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis and Mayor Rahm Emanuel had cut a deal to avert a teachers’ strike, Kris Bryant hit a ninth-inning homer to send the Cubs/Giants game into extra innings. So let me break from pounding the mayor like a piñata in order to praise him. In case you’ve forgotten, the TIF program collects up to $500 million a year in property taxes....

To some Chicagoans, “Drab City” might sound like the name of a pickup band that plays melancholy covers of Will Oldham and Joanna Newsom tunes, but it’s actually a Berlin duo that specializes in an understated, lo-fi combo of cinematic trip-hop and folky dream pop, flavored with a little jazz and some fuzzy samples. Multi-instrumentalists and producers Chris Dexter Greenspan (who helped pioneer witch house as oOoOO) and Asia (who performs as Islamiq Grrrls) hatched Drab City after joining forces on a 2018 collaborative album under their stage names; that record, Faminine Mystique, is eclectic enough to incorporate 80s metal-ballad guitar and Auto-Tuned vocals from one track to the next without seeming incoherent....

We had reasons for feeling giddy after dinner at Beacon Tavern, Billy Lawless’s new restaurant in a former McDonald’s behind the Wrigley Building. It was a beautiful summer night. We were on the brink of a three-day weekend. And we had just eaten a splendid meal. So there’s magical, and there’s special, and there’s also very good, which is how I’d rate most of the other dishes I tried at Beacon Tavern....

On Wednesday, November 13, DaWreck of west-side hip-hop group Triple Darkness posted a mini documentary to YouTube about E.C. Illa’s 1994 EP, Live From the Ill. The video E.C. Illa Dissecting Live From the Ill shows E.C. sitting in front of a camera and talking for almost 28 minutes about the creation and history of his EP. When he dropped Live From the Ill, E.C. was one of Chicago hip-hop’s brightest stars, and his recollections of the music, people, and places that filtered into the EP make the video a must-watch for any hip-hop head....

Traditionally, the classic American steak house has been the restaurant of American individualism, or perhaps selfishness. You may share that shrimp cocktail appetizer, or the side of creamed spinach, with your boys in flannel suits, but when it comes down to the main attraction, what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours. Keep your paws off my T-bone, dog, or I’ll go for your throat. It starts with the name, GT Prime, the initials standing for Giuseppe Tentori, the longtime Boka Group chef and Trotter’s vet who opened the estimable GT Fish & Oyster in 2011....

I suffer from completist tendencies, which made it difficult to select ten films to preview from this year’s Chicago International Film Festival. Unable to watch every film due to time and availability, I can’t say that these are the best films of the festival, but they’re ten that caught my fancy, either through an affinity for their directors or curiosity about filmmakers and subjects unknown to me. Days A spiritual sequel of sorts to his 1997 masterpiece The River, Tsai Ming-liang’s first narrative feature since Stray Dogs (2013) returns to the real-life health problems of the director’s recurring star and collaborator Lee Kang-sheng....

Jonathan Daniel/Getty They’re happy—but what about us? Postcoital tristesse doesn’t just happen in the bedroom. But postcoital tristesse is worse in other sports. When you do it and it’s over and they’re gone and you’re facing an empty room—how does that make you feel? When the hockey season ends the door doesn’t click shut in quite the same awful way. The coach drives home where his neighbors TP’d his trees....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, October 20, 2016. Hundreds of park water fountains test positive for high lead levels Hundreds of drinking fountains in city parks have high levels of lead, according to a recent wave of testing. The Chicago Park District conducted 2,435 tests at 479 parks, more than 200 of which had water sources with lead levels above Environmental Protection Agency standards. “In response to the testing, 14 of 544 indoor drinking water sources (fountains and sinks) and 445 of 1,891 outdoor fountains were disabled, as they were found to have levels higher than the EPA drinking water standard of 15 ppb,” district officials said in a statement....

It’s easy enough to argue that there are more well-known television shows being filmed in Chicago—sets for Dick Wolf’s multiple shows on the city’s ins and outs alone are always popping up. But increasingly some of the most entertaining and creative series coming out of Chicago exist solely on the Internet. Just in time for bingeing when you need an escape from the holiday dinner table, here are some local webseries from the past year worth checking out....

Choosing The Tempest as their first show to break the enforced theatrical silence of the past 16 months makes a lot of sense for Oak Park Festival Theatre. Shakespeare’s late romance celebrates the “rough magic” of finding redemption, love, and freedom after storms both literal and metaphorical have knocked the characters on their asses. We can relate, certainly. It’s here where he summons the title storm (which also could fit with the implied climate-change sub-theme) to bring ashore his treacherous sister Antonia (Jeannie Affelder, handling the gender-reversed role with icy aplomb), Alonsa, the queen of Naples (Noelle Klyce, bringing mournful maternal warmth to another role originally envisioned as a man), and the latter’s son, Ferdinand (Austyn Williamson), who woos and wins the forthright-if-flummoxed Miranda (Deanalis Resto)....